The present invention relates to a bill discriminating device which is able to carry out a bill discriminating operation at high-speed based on a reduced amount of processing data for bill type discrimination by extracting and reading only characteristic regions of the bill.
Bill discriminating devices are known and one example is disclosed in Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 18087/1986. This prior art bill discriminating device is adapted to discriminate the type and the genuineness of bills based on data relating to substantially the whole area of the bill by reading picture images present along a band running diagonally across the bill by means of an image sensor.
The bill dispensing device of the prior art is advantageous in that it can discriminate the genuineness of a bill with high precision based upon a minimum amount of data substantially over the whole region of bill. However, since important data required for discriminating the genuineness of a bill does not always appear on the diagonal band of bill, it often happens that important data are missed and only unnecessary data is obtained. A further problem is that a long time is required to carry out the discriminating process with respect to all bits of data read from the diagonal band of the bill.